WHY is it so many feel they have the right to tell others how to live their lives? Nowhere does the ending of “Million Dollar Baby” imply disabled people are worthless (Feb. 27). It says that people have the right to choose how they live and if that right is affected by something, then they also have the right to choose how to die. I don’t tell the handicapped person their life is worthless and they have to die but they feel they have the right to tell me my life, if I were handicapped, is worthwhile and I have to live. They can’t have it both ways.

Flo Samuels

Hayward

Doug Mead

gets it

Ihave been reading Doug Mead’s “Flying Solo” column, and I have to say that it is very refreshing to listen to his trials and tribulations of life.

I, too, have been a single parent of a son for 11 years so I guess I feel like we have something in common. My father also had cancer, and when I read Feb. 6 about how his Mom sat down in his Dad’s lap I just cried because that is what I want. That’s what my Mom and Dad had, and sometimes I think people just aren’t like that anymore, meaning the commitment and respect for themselves and their family and kids.

When I read the column I think that he must be one of those few people that understand what’s really important in life, and he’s a man — sorry no offense, but not many men are as sensitive to life as he is and able to express it so easily.

I agree with Svend la Rose that the problem of teen sex has not been that teens are having sex so much as the hypocritical idea that they should not. Humans are sexual beings and this extends to teens. It is blind and quite damaging that our society seeks to repress the obvious natural growth of our children by fear, guilt, shame and lack of free access to information and contraception. Remember that the Comstock Laws of the early 1900s prevented this same idea because contraception was deemed a threat to morality. This seems primitive to us now … but how far have we come?

Where I disagree with Svend la Rose is in the emotional impact of sex on many teens in the prevailing atmosphere of our cultural gender roles. We do not teach in our homes, nor in schools, topics such as relationship responsibility or person and personhood.

Your article very clearly outlines the many ways that young people can become easily

manipulated, in the name of “not being a prude,” into having a very damaging and unsatisfying sexual experience. So while I agree that it is natural for young people to seek what we all long for, there has never been a solid foundation in our culture that also teaches young people their value, their responsibility in relationships, conflict resolution, or emotional self health.

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